The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Welcome to the Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast. I'm your host, Maia. No matter who, what, or when you teach, I'm here to share all my best tips and tools along with real and practical conversations with fellow dance educators to help you be the very best dance teacher you can be.

Let's talk about it. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Choreography Month here on the show.

It is my favorite time of year. I love talking about choreography. I get so excited about creating new choreography.

And when you guys let me also weigh in and chime in on your choreographic process, that is so exciting for me. So thank you. One of the questions that I have heard a lot from choreographers online in our Casual Dance Teacher's Network and other networks as well is, how do I come up with new and interesting transitions within the dance? So if you've been listening throughout this month, we've talked about ways of generating new ideas, new themes, and new movement material and keeping all of that fresh and breaking through the block on that.

But you might still get a little bit blocked up on how do you work a group of dancers on the stage in a way that's interesting and continually changes and shifts so they're not just doing interesting movement material in one static place for the entire dance. And I have to say, this is an area where I don't mean to sound like I'm talking down to people, but I think amateur choreographers get this wrong a lot. And I hate to even say that because it's art.

It's subjective. You know, there's not really a right or wrong way to do it. But you just kind of know watching if that person had a clear intention and understanding of why and how they were transitioning and moving the dancers around to different areas on the stage versus they maybe felt like I have to have different formations in the dance, so I'll put them in this formation, then this formation, then this formation, and it doesn't feel cohesive.

It doesn't feel like there's intention behind it. It just kind of stands out. And I see those types of dances all the time where you have beautiful movement.

You have beautiful technique. You have a really, really cool concept, and you have awesome combinations, awesome tricks, awesome movement material in there. It's all very eye-catching and cool.

But there's like maybe three distinct parts of the dance where all of a sudden you lose that for a second, they transition into new positions, and then it picks back up. And those moments leave you really wanting more and feeling like why did that happen? Why did we lose the intention of the dance for a second for this transition? So if you are trying to make your dance very cohesive and flow, but you feel like I just keep putting dancers in the same formations in my dance or, oh, I don't know how to get my dancers from point A to point B in a way that's interesting that I haven't already done 15 gazillion times in previous years' dances. These are just some things to think about to help you kind of push through the mental block of coming up with new transitions that you might be able to apply to your own dances.

And I'll start by just reiterating something that I mentioned in the previous season talking about choreography. If you do have a very specific narrative theme for the dance, that's typically the biggest place where I will draw my transitions from. So I gave the example in the previous season of Alice in Wonderland.

Alice is going through Wonderland on all these curving paths. She's falling down. Nothing really makes sense.

There's no rhyme or reason. So if the theme of my dance was anything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I would probably be trying to figure out how the dancers could travel in a spiral formation in curving lines and patterns, how they could be creating sort of off-kilter imagery. And regardless of what style of dance it was, whether it's a tap piece, hip-hop piece, contemporary piece, if it is somehow informed by that concept of Alice in Wonderland, that would tell me how to go about those transitions and how I would want the bodies moving through the space, regardless of what type of movement they're doing.

Now, just to give you an example from a show I just recently did, we performed the song I'll Make a Man Out of You from Mulan. And obviously, with the military influence, there was absolutely no curved lines, no circle formations, nothing like that. Everything was very line-oriented.

And so even when we were looking at transitions and moving from one place to the next, they were marching. They were staying in straight lines. They were making sure that they had open windows between the bodies so everyone could be seen, could be very upright and straight.

So those are just some very, very basic examples of ways that theming could motivate the transitions. With that said, as we know, and I've said numerous, numerous times on the show, you don't always have to have a very specific narrative theme or a theme that would be so specific as to inform the transition. So in that case, you do need to start turning to some other devices similar to the choreographic devices that we use to come up with new and interesting movement material.

So using that idea of choreographic devices, let's just look at some of those that we used in the previous episode and talk about how those can be applied to transitions as well. So the first one that comes to mind for me is the idea of accumulation and or deconstruction. I think they kind of go hand in hand.

If you know that you want the dancers to start in one formation and then transition to another, but you're not sure how to get them there, I know it can be very common for us to say, I have to come up with a traveling phrase or combination, and then the dancers will do that traveling step to get to this new formation, which is fine. But if you're finding that it's not really inspiring you, or perhaps dancers are running into each other when they're doing that, or it's just not really interesting to watch, could you do that instead in an accumulative way? So for example, dancers are in a line and you want them to go to a circle. I know it's like a super basic, but let's just say that.

And actually, I'm glad I said that, because that is something that I can think of an exact example of when I did this in a dance before. And it's a dance that I referenced in the theming episode a couple weeks back, where I had started the whole dance with just poses. And gradually I built on that.

And so actually, at one point, all of the dancers were in a straight line across the stage in their pose, just holding a pose. As the music came in, I then had them transition into a circle formation by accumulating into a traveling phrase traveling around the circle with the dancers at the outer ends of the line on the farthest to the right and the farthest to the left starting. So the dancer farthest stage right started traveling down stage and around the circle doing this traveling combination, while the stage left dancer started traveling up stage and around the circle kind of following that dancer in this big wide circle.

Then in canon, the next two dancers on the inside of the line began following them a few counts later, joining into the circle. Now we have four dancers traveling around the circle. Few counts later, the next two dancers closer to the inside of the circle started traveling upstage and downstage.

And when they met the other dancers on that curve of the circle, they joined it. So we kept accumulating more and more dancers into that traveling step until they were all in the circle. Then they traveled around the circle.

And then they actually gradually kind of unfurled into a diagonal line in that particular example. I hope that made sense. That was a little wordy.

Probably I could have done a simpler example. But the whole idea is that I didn't just say, okay, on the count of five, six, seven, eight, we're all going to move into this circle formation and start traveling around it. I added them in little by little.

And this could be done in any formation. And what you'll probably find is that as you're adding more and more dancers to it, or maybe you're having dancers move within a certain formation, and then gradually you'll have dancers sort of drop out helter skelter and while other dancers are still moving, and then they'll end in some random formation of dancers around in the space kind of scattered about. But however you're doing it, you might find these pockets of, oh, I didn't realize that was going to happen if certain dancers were going this way, and certain dancers were going this way, or if certain dancers were dancing in place, and certain dancers were traveling.

But they turn into these really nice, interesting moments that you couldn't predict. I think probably the best choreographers can predict that. I don't know.

I'd love to have a conversation with a better choreographer than me about this specifically, because kind of like some people are really good at chess because they can look ahead and say, if I move my pawn now, then, you know, three moves from now, I can take the queen. I cannot do that. I'm like, I'm one move at a time.

And honestly, I'm kind of like that as a choreographer too. So what I often do in the studio is like, let's move the pawn and see what happens. And then if we don't take the queen within three moves, we'll go back and say, okay, that didn't work.

So let's move the rook this time and see if that gets us to where we want to be. Naturally, I would not be doing that with three and four-year-olds because they need a lot more structure. But I think if you can set some really, really broad parameters for dancers that have some experience and have them play with that, you'll find some really cool transitions within that.

Okay, next up. This is a good one, I think, for those younger kids, for less experienced dancers. Change direction or reverse.

We talked about how you can do that with the basic movement, but that's also such an easy one for formation. So with younger kids, I got to tell you a lot of times, I'm putting them in three lines. We might start off by height, but I talked last season too.

I don't always want my tall dancers in the back. I want every single dancer to have that front and center moment. So throughout the dance with younger dancers, I might have the front line split and run to the back or all run stage left and around and to the back of the formation.

All the other dancers move forward in their same lines. Now we have a new line in the front, similar to how we do in class. But the nice thing is I don't want to be throwing a lot of different formations at dancers at a very young, basic level.

But I also don't want them dancing in the exact same spots for the whole dance because that becomes boring for them and the parents and again might end up hiding some dancers where they don't get as much visibility. So just taking that same formation and reversing the direction of it, having them split and go to the back and other dancers move forward can give you a new perspective without really having to do anything crazy. And then if you have dancers, let's say, in a line and you can have them just rotate 180 degrees or rotate 90 degrees and then you're getting a new perspective, but they could be doing the same or similar movement.

That combo is probably going to look very different if the dancers are positioned in a horizontal line versus a diagonal line or a vertical line. So there's three different formations right there that you could throw into a dance and the transition from one to the next could be as simple as a few traveling steps that the dancers closer to the center do more in place and the dancers on the outside do larger. If you are doing some kind of traveling combination in one formation and you could maybe do it backwards to then move the whole formation to get a different perspective on it.

Finally, I've talked a lot about doing different dynamics to the movement. So if you have the same exact move, you can do it fast. You can do it slow.

You can do it with a lot of energy. You can do it with a little bit of energy. You can do it with the accent at the beginning.

You can do it with the accent at the end. Just changing it up that way. And I like to think about changing the spacing of the dancers in a similar way.

So for example, I'm just going to use circle again because visually we all know what a circle is. It's hard to explain different formations without that visual component. So if you have your dancers in a circle and you want to transition to change things up, but you don't have really a specific reason to do so.

You're just thinking like, well, they've been in a circle for a while and now we need something different for them. You don't have to come up with a new shape or a new formation to put them in. You can use the circle and let it expand and contract into all sorts of different things.

So literally have them spread out, make the circle really big, more space between them. You might alternate. So there's a smaller circle on the inside and a larger circle on the outside.

So some dancers are coming in closer to each other. Others are going out. If you continue to contract that circle in, in, in, they might end up in a very tight clump.

They might end up coming into contact with each other. They might end up in a really, really tight shoulder to shoulder formation. And it's still technically a circle, but you're changing the, the dynamic or the texture of it in a big way.

If all of a sudden from that circle, you wanted to create some jagged edges, maybe certain dancers could come in a little bit. You create a square or a triangle or more of a star like formation. Or as I mentioned with the Alice in Wonderland example, maybe some dancers could start spiraling in and the circle would begin to spiral and then it could expand back out.

And this works with, again, any formation or positioning of the bodies. If they're in multiple lines, they can contract into one line, then back out. They can pass through each other and then end up in a different line or lines.

They can get shoulder to shoulder and go into a clump, or they could start to round out until they end up in a circle. Those are just a couple really basic ideas. But again, what I think it all comes back to, I'm going to keep coming back to this is before you start, make sure you understand what your dance is about.

You might have a very concrete answer. Like my dance is about Alice in Wonderland, or you might have an answer. Like my dance is about showcasing these dancers power in jumps, or my dance is about showcasing this beautiful piece of music that I found particularly the beautiful fluid melody that I love.

But whatever your answer is, as long as you have that answer queued up, when it comes time to build the dance and put the dancers in space and move them through the space, if you then get to a place where you're stuck and you're not sure where they can go, how to make it look more interesting, how to transition from one positioning to the next, you go back to that answer and say, what does that tell me about what I should be doing here? At the end of the day, I can't answer that for you. But I hope over these past couple weeks, I've given you a number of different ideas and examples that maybe spurred that creativity that you're like, oh, yeah, I can do this. I can answer the question this way.

I can think about it from a different perspective. I have that fuel to now move forward to answer those questions and use them to create really exciting pieces that I love and that my students love and that the audiences love to watch. So give me some feedback, please, in the Casual Dance Teachers Network Facebook group about your own choreography.

What do you do if you get stuck on transitions? Did you use any of these devices? If you want to reach out to me personally, you can do that through the Casual Dance Teachers podcast on Instagram. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so that you keep getting notified about future episodes coming out and leave a review if you haven't already. Before I go, I'm going to leave you with a quote.

And I truly could not believe that I found this quote for today's episode. It is so very on the nose. This is from someone who I would say knows a thing or two about creating iconic choreography.

And that is Martha Graham. She said, The essence of dance is in transition, not position.